Alterities Working Group: Queer Machines & Sexual Contracts

Queer Machines and Sexual Contracts: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

This talk addresses whether "queer" genders and desires, by proliferating in ever-new forms, simply mirror capitalist demands for novelty and hyperproduction. The talk questions how new, more category-resistant bodies, genders, and sexualities coexist with still-rampant but also culturally specific patterns of violent misogyny, which presume a gender binary with unequal allotments of power. The talk uses The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, especially the 2011 Hollywood version, as a lens for seeing how queer or "machinic" genders and sexualities coexist with binaristic and misogynistic models of both, and how capital operates within that coexistence. In this way, Tattoo's Lisbeth Salander stands as one of many female protagonists in 21st century global films about precarious contracts and ambiguous sexual consent who help us perceive and confront interlocking problems of misogyny, capitalism, and would-be "radical" changes to gendered and sexual norms.